Thursday, August 3, 2017

Self Punishment.

Your idea of your 'self', that
character whose survival and prosperity you have become committed to,
was born of life's lessons learned and has become, through the years,
a work of masterly fiction, a fabric of lies and half-truths that,
moment by moment, help you navigate through this fake reality and
avoid pain or antagonism.

Like many, you may hate your job and
despise those that 'manage' your 'performance' day by day.

You never speak those truths, to avoid
demotion or dismissal or endless 'meetings' with 'human resource
officers' to discuss your 'motivation'.

Like many, you may live somewhere
dominated by the aggressive and every day lock your doors and
windows, every day peek outside to see if the way is clear, every day
shiver with fear at a knock at the door or a shout outside your
window.

You are in debt, to the usurers,
through your government (debt collectors via taxation) and most
usually up to your eyeballs in personal debt: The unending mortgage,
the car loan, the credit cards, the overdraft, the student loan and,
if you are poor, the payday loan from the crown of the lending
business, the 999.99% interest debt shackle from which you will never
be free. You lie every day to your self, insist that things will be
alright, believe that things will get better, stopping to buy a
scratch card or a lottery ticket on your way home and, for a day or
two, living the dream of winning. We most of us create such
fantasies, lie to our self, reassure our self that things will get
better.

Hope.

We lie when we dress, covering what's
unsightly, reassuring our self that we look alright.

We lie when we make up every morning,
plastering the truth with a mask.

We lie to our kids when we say things
are alright when they are not.

We lie to our self that, when the medic
plunges the final vaccine into our children, that we are powerless to
prevent them. We lie when we reassure ourselves that the 'Doctor'
knows best. Then we pray that ours will be spared the rampant
epidemic, and lie to others that we weren't worried (if we are lucky)
and to ourselves if we are unlucky: It can't have been the vaccine. I
did the right thing.....

We lie to ourselves when we affirm,
vociferously, that abortion is a good thing, a woman's right, a
statement of how far women have travelled towards equality when,
later and in maturity, we realise we have travelled far in the
opposite direction, realising it's a woman's right to keep her
children and fuck the inconvenience, fuck the opprobrium of the
falsely pious, fuck the supposed 'shame' and, most importantly, fuck
the completely empty and worthless career that we lie to ourselves is
important when, at last, we realise was a crock of shit.

We lie to our self when we go to vote
(those that still bother), telling our self that things will get
better if we vote this way or that, telling our self not to believe
what others say, that democracy is fake, that its a fix, because we
want to cling to hope, want to cling to the idea that we matter when
we don't.

We are each of us two beings.

The first is the creature you were
born.

The second the creature you created to
protect the real you from the hurt and harm in the world.

Know this:

You need not have become a liar, need
not have buried your true self beneath the shroud, if only the world
was a world of truth, a world of good.

We pass on our skills at lying to our
kids:

“Don't say that”

“You can't do that”

“The Doctor knows best”

“You need to study and learn and pass
tests”

“You need a job”

“Santa Claus will leave you a present
if you're good”

“They're in heaven now”

“Allah is God, Jesus is God, Jehovah
is God, the Bible/Koran/Torah is the true word of God”

“It's against the law”

Now imagine a world where we only speak
the truth......

It's almost impossible.

And yet it must be.

Lies come from fear, every time, every
lie.

We need to stop being afraid.

We need to stop lying.

The two go hand in hand.

Our world has been shaped with careful
deliberation to make liars of us all, by making us afraid of the
truth.

In our tribal days we all of us were
surprised when we first met a liar, because this is an unnatural
thing for human beings, a taught behaviour, each lie depending on a
fear to bring it into the reality.

Our tribal predecessors spoke of liars
as “those who speak with a forked tongue”.

Those who had become servants of the
snake.

Those who lived in fear.

Those who came and slaughtered because
they feared the hierarchy more than they feared those they
slaughtered.

The power has you in its grip.

Each lie tells of your cowardice.

You do not lie to 'protect other's
feelings'.

Rather, you lie because you fear the
consequence of telling the truth.

And yet if we all told the truth, every
moment of every day, then each of us would live in a reality of
truth, knowing exactly what we are, never needing to protect the
inner self, the self we were born.

And so those inner selves, at last,
could speak their truths into the world.

And that truth, the telling of it, will
set each and every one of us free.

Free of the prison of lies we have
built for our self.

Free of the power of the serpent.

These are the ancient understandings,
the root and branch and leaf and fruit of the tree that is humanity.
Truth is always good when the world is so shaped, when there is
nothing to fear from truth, when, at last, we are free of fear.